Interesting, Elon seems to think he can get astronauts to the ISS by 2011

"Space Exploration Technologies, known as SpaceX, plans to go even further than delivering supplies to the station. Its founder, Elon Musk, says that his rockets could help NASA fill the human flight gap as early as 2011. The company successfully launched a single-engine rocket design into orbit on its fourth try; it plans to launch the first of its larger, nine-engine rockets for station cargo deliveries in the coming year."

certainly less risky than the first flights back in the early 60's. The space shuttle's first flight had two astronauts aboard. That was risky. The falcon 9 and dragon will have at least a few flights under their belt by then.

Risky?
Of course! Every of our current methods of reaching space is "risky", period. I think this will not change until we make some huge leaps in technology, simply because humans are in no way suited for space travel.

More risky than other rockets?
Maybe, maybe not. As stated in the article, Falcon 9 already has the 40% safety margin required by NASA for human rated launchers built in. The only thing missing towards a human rated vehicle is the launch escape system.

So once the Falcon 9 has done lets say a total of ~10 unmanned launches before a first manned launch takes place, it will be a more proven, more reliable system than Ares I will be when operations begin (Of course only in the case of no major problems with F9 until then).

I think the general misconception is, that building on "proven, reliable systems" makes a new product as reliable as its predecessor. Wrong. There are numerous examples in history where this approach has led to unexpected problems/failures (not only limited to rocketry).
Example: the failure of very first Ariane 5 launch was _because_ of the use of a "well known and proven" flight-computer/-software (from Ariane 4), that turned out to be unable to handle the parameters of the larger Ariane 5.

So with a system like Ares I, where nearly every part is in some way an upgraded/improved or reused component you get a hell of a lot of "Ooops, we didn't think about that one...".

Designing a completely new system, based on "proven concepts" instead of "proven components" is in my opinion not only more efficient, but less error-prone as well because you make less assumptions about how a part will perform.